WINES OF THE TIMES; Playing With the Grown-Ups

By ERIC ASIMOV

Published: October 3, 2007

WHEN it comes to just about anything in wine, if you can't start an argument, you're not really trying. Take the 2005 vintage for Beaujolais. My opinion is, it's great! And I don't have to try very hard to find corroboration.

''The 2005 vintage will be a reference point for Beaujolais,'' Guillaume de Castelnau, the winemaker for Louis Jadot's Ch?au des Jacques, said as we tasted through his sensational Moulin-?ents during my recent visit.

A lot of people believe that. As in most wine regions in France, 2005 was exceptional, and to hear the winemakers tell it, exceptionally easy. The weather was fine, the harvest was smooth, and the winemaking required them simply to not muck it up. The wines are of unusual intensity, yet unlike the 2003 vintage, grown in a year of freakish heat that also produced intense wines, the 2005s also possess rare balance. As a result, many Beaujolais winemakers see 2005 as having produced age-worthy Beaujolais, a seemingly oxymoronic idea.

And yet the verdict, even in Beaujolais, is not unanimous.

''I love the 2005s, sure, but for the real spirit of Beaujolais, 2006 is hard to beat,'' Alain Coudert of Clos de la Roilette in Fleurie told me when I saw him last week. Indeed, the 2006s are lighter and more immediately pleasurable, wines to drink while the 2005s are aging.

I need not have traveled quite so far for a disagreement. We had one right in wine panel headquarters in New York, at a recent tasting of the 2005 Beaujolais vintage, where Florence Fabricant and I were joined by two guests, Fred Dexheimer, a manager at T. Edward Wines, an importer, and Jean-Luc Le D?wner of Le D?Wines in the West Village.

We concentrated only on cru Beaujolais, wines from 10 communes considered fine enough to have earned their own appellations. Of the 25 bottles we tasted, nine were from Morgon; four from Fleurie; three from Moulin-?ent, perhaps the greatest of the crus; three from Juli?s; two from Ch?s; and one each from Chiroubles, Brouilly, C?de Brouilly and St.-Amour. Only R?i?the youngest cru, was unrepresented.

Some top Beaujolais names were also absent. The Jadot 2005 Moulin-?ents and Morgons had not been released at the time of our tasting. Some top names didn't make our cut, though I continue to think highly of them. They include Michel T?, Jean-Paul Brun, Jean Foillard, Marcel Lapierre and Clos de la Roilette. The one entry from Georges Duboeuf, the Jean Descombes Morgon, also did not make our top 10 list, though I think it's a pretty good wine, too.

I found the tasting fascinating, and it confirmed to me that the best Beaujolais today are not the bright, easygoing down-by-the-flagon wines of yore. Today, great Beaujolais is a combination of lightness and charm with intensity, of refreshment with dense fruit and mineral flavors, and these qualities were all amplified in the 2005 vintage.

Jean-Luc didn't see it that way. ''I was extremely disappointed,'' he said. ''I can see why Beaujolais is not as popular today.''

His problem? He found too many wines of high acidity -- not the usual issue for Beaujolais -- and he found too many wines tasting of banana and strawberry -- the stereotypical characteristics of insipid Beaujolais. ''I'd rather drink barberas or cabernet franc from the Loire,'' he said.

Were Jean-Luc and I really at the same tasting?

Neither Fred nor Florence was nearly as negative as Jean-Luc, nor were they as excited as I was. While they liked the wines, they were also somewhat puzzled. Fred found wines that he felt were soulful and minerally, which had a sense of place, but, he asked, ''Shouldn't Beaujolais be light and fresh?'' Florence echoed the thought: ''Some winemaking is going on that subverts what makes gamay charming.''

Clearly, Beaujolais has an identity crisis, or at least it did in 2005. But allow me to try to clear it up.

Any wine, whether Beaujolais or Bordeaux, Chianti or cabernet sauvignon, is going to be something of a prisoner of its past and of its reputation. But how much of an anchor should a reputation be for a wine? For example, I, like Jean-Luc, love barbera. It's at base a crisp fruity wine with refreshing acidity that is superb with pizza, pasta and meat sauces, and a wide range of other foods. But ambitious winemakers were not satisfied with simple barbera. They saw great, untapped potential in the grape, and tried to unleash it. This has sometimes resulted in disaster, as with highly oaked barberas that retain nothing of the grape's rustic charm. But when approached with skill and respect for its character, ambitious barbera can be quite wonderful.

The great thing about ambitious Beaujolais, I think, is that it retains its joyous character while augmenting its depth and structure. We all, even Jean-Luc, agreed that our No. 1 wine, a finely etched Moulin-?ent from Domaine du Vissoux, had everything going for it -- depth, charm and balance. Likewise, our No. 2 wine, a Chiroubles from Domaine Cheysson, was lively and delicious, lighter than the Moulin-?ent yet still with substance. The other wines in our top 10 that showed the more easygoing side of Beaujolais included a floral and mineral Brouilly from Alain Michaud and a delicate St.-Amour from Domaine le Carjot, both known for lighter wines.